This chapter is from the book

This chapter is from the book

A high-performance automobile is little more than an interesting amalgam of metal and plastic if it's missing tires and fuel. Sure, given the proper slope (and, perhaps, a helpful tailwind), that car is capable of movement, but the resulting journey leaves much to be desired. So, too, the iPod is a less-capable music-making vehicle without Apple's music player/encoder, iTunes. The two—like coffee and cream, dill and pickle, and Fred and Ginger—were simply meant for each other.

To best understand what makes the iPod's world turn, you must be familiar with how it and iTunes work together to move music (and pictures, in the case of color iPods) on and off your iPod. In the following pages, you'll learn just that.

Ripping a CD

Apple intended the process of converting the music on an audio CD to computer data to be painless, and it is. Here's how to go about it:

Launch iTunes.

Insert an audio CD into your computer's CD or DVD drive.
By default, iTunes will try to identify the CD you've inserted and log on to the Web to download the CD's song tracks—a very handy feature for those who find typing such minutia to be tedious. The CD appears in iTunes' Source list, and the tracks appear in the Song list to the right (FIGURE 3.1).

Figure 3.1 This album's song tracks were downloaded from the Web automatically by iTunes.

To convert the audio tracks to a format compatible with your iPod—AAC, MP3, Apple Lossless, AIFF, or WAV—click the Import CD button in the top-right corner of the iTunes window.
(To import only certain songs, choose Edit > Select None and then click the boxes next to the songs you want to import. Click the Import CD button to import just those selected songs.)
iTunes begins encoding the files via the encoder chosen in the Importing tab of the Advanced pane of the iTunes Preferences window (FIGURE 3.2). By default, iTunes imports songs in AAC format.

It may seem so, given the plethora of acronyms floating through modern-day Technotopia. But the lingo and the basics behind it aren't terribly difficult to understand.

MP3, AAC, AIFF, and WAV are audio file formats. The compression methods used to create MP3 and AAC files are termed lossy because the encoder removes information from the original sound file to create these smaller files. Fortunately, these encoders are designed to remove the information you're least likely to miss—audio frequencies that you can't hear easily, for example.

AIFF and WAV files are uncompressed, containing all the data from the original. When a Macintosh pulls audio from an audio CD, it does so in AIFF format, which is the native uncompressed audio format used by Apple's QuickTime technology. WAV is a variant of AIFF and is used extensively with the Windows operating system.

iTunes supports one other compression format: Apple Lossless. This is termed a lossless encoder because the encoder doesn't shrink the file by removing portions of the audio spectrum; rather, it removes redundant data. This scheme allows you to retain all the audio quality of the original file while producing a copy just over half the size of that original file.

Now that you're familiar with these file formats, let's touch on resolution.

You probably know that the more pixels per inch a digital photograph has, the crisper the image (and the larger the file). Resolution applies to audio as well. But audio defines resolution by the number of kilobytes per second (Kbps) contained in an audio file. With files encoded similarly, the higher the kilobyte count, the better-sounding the file (and the larger the file).

I emphasize "with files encoded similarly" because the quality of the file depends a great deal on the encoder used to compress it. Many people claim that if you encode a file at 128 Kbps in both the MP3 and AAC formats, the AAC file will sound better.

The Import Using pop-up menu lets you choose to import files in AAC, AIFF, Apple Lossless, MP3, or WAV format. All display-bearing iPods can play files encoded in the AAC, MP3, AIFF, and WAV formats. Only Dock connector iPods can play songs formatted with the Apple Lossless Encoder. The iPod shuffle can play all these formats except AIFF and Apple Lossless.

The Configuration pop-up menu is where you choose the resolution of the AAC and MP3 files encoded by iTunes. iTunes' default setting is High Quality (128 Kbps). To change this setting, choose Custom from the Setting pop-up menu, and in the resulting AAC Encoder window, choose a different setting—in a range from 16 to 320 Kbps—from the Stereo Bit Rate pop-up menu (FIGURE 3.3). Files encoded at a high bit rate sound better than those encoded at a low bit rate (such as 96 Kbps). But files encoded at higher bit rates also take up more space on your hard drive and iPod.

The default settings for MP3 importing include Good Quality (128 Kbps), High Quality (160 Kbps), and Higher Quality (192 Kbps). If you don't care to use one of these settings, choose Custom from this same pop-up menu. In the MP3 Encoder dialog box that appears, you have the option to choose a bit rate ranging from 8 to 320 Kbps.